A great place to view history

I went to see the new Tampa Bay History Center the other day along with my schoolteacher wife, the Frau, who was eager to look at its educational possibilities - and they are tremendous.

For those of you who have not seen it - and most have not - the new center is going to be one of the defining landmarks of downtown Tampa. Its setting by the channel, and proximity to the expanding Riverwalk and soon-to-be-completed Heroes Plaza, are spectacular. The Columbia Restaurant's bistro inside the center, with outdoor seating overlooking the channel and Harbour Island, is hard to beat.

The only immediate problem is that there isn't much parking, and a space at the only nearby lot is five bucks.

It's easy to measure the importance of having this place up and running, if for no other reason than getting an appreciation of how we all came to be here.

Life before the Bucs?

I remember a few years ago, I was in some meeting down here at Mother Trib where they had some consultants - I've never quite understood why companies are always so eager to hire people to tell them how to do their jobs - to explain how we could expand our market. These two characters, I mean consultants, were going on about how Tampa was at a marketing disadvantage because the town had no history and thus no sense of community loyalty. It never could be like Philadelphia or Boston.

I snarled at them, but if we had had the history center I could have hauled them down to show off a history that was old before Boston and Philly were gleams in the colonists' eyes.

Not that the new center is perfect. You know, it was Winston Churchill who said history is written by the victors.

Well, the victors don't fare all that well on the first floor. Here are the early days of the 16th century when life was pretty good - except for a lack of air conditioning - until the explorers from Spain began showing up looking for gold and lands to conquer.

There is a nifty film detailing the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition in 1528. Narváez was hardly a spokesman for the Spanish chamber of commerce, and you walk out of the show feeling a little guilty.

Making her point

There are great artifacts of those days on display, including what I thought was a terrific display of arrowheads, until the docent told me we don't call them that anymore.

"They are projectile points," she said. That was a little disappointing when I think about all the "projectile points" I found as a kid thinking they were arrowheads.

From there, you go into another theater, which has the story of Seminole Chief Coacoochee - he was captured during the Second Seminole War - and the bad things we did to the chief and other Seminoles.

By the time you walk out of that second show, you are feeling so guilty you might even consider going out to the Hard Rock casino and donating money to the slot machines as reparations.

It gets better when you go upstairs (take the stairs to see the old Maas Bros. sign) and watch the region grow through the past two centuries. If you listen closely, you might even hear me in a nook of the room.

It gets better if you stop off at the Columbia for a bite. The best thing on the menu is a meatloaf sandwich on hot pressed Cuban bread. Trust me on this.